Justin Long to lend some cheerful horror cred to Disney Plus’ Goosebumps show

Justin Long, fresh off appearing in two high-profile horror movies in recent months—Neil LaBute’s House Of Darkness and Zach Cregger’s Barbarian—has just added a slightly less horrifying breed of horror to his resumé: Goosebumps.

Specifically, Variety reports today that Long has signed on to co-star in Disney+’s latest efforts to bring R.L. Stine’s long-running series of kid-aimed horror books to TV. Long will appear in the series as Nathan Brett, described as “the new schoolteacher who develops a terrifying connection to a decades-old supernatural murder,” which many teachers in America describe as one of the major and most common hardships of the job. (It’s right between “not enough goddamn money” and “COVID-19.”)

Unlike the previous Goosebumps show, which ran on Fox Kids in the U.S. from 1995 to 1998, this new series will forgo the anthology series format in favor of a more serialized story, centering on a group of highschoolers who find that their lives keep getting interrupted by the supernatural. Disney has said that the show will take as its inspiration five of Stine’s most popular Goosebumps books, so, what… Night Of The Living Dummy, Say Cheese And Die, Let’s Get Invisible, Monster Blood, and Attack Of The Mutant? (We want a dollar from somebody if even half that list turns out to be correct.)

(Also, is it just us, or is it weird that the new show is centered on highschoolers, when the Goosebumps demographic was very firmly like fourth-through-sixth grades? But we digress.)

The new Goosebumps TV series is being produced by 2015 Goosebumps movie director Rob Letterman alongside Nick Stoller. Long is the first cast member announced for the show, giving it that very particularly Justin Long mixture of genuine horror cred and smiling nice guy charm that feels pretty much ideal for a Disney+ kids-aimed horror show.